All the time I see things, and wish that you were
here to see them with your own eyes...I have a fantasy that if I
concentrate hard enough I can send them to you so that you might see
them in your dreams.

--Louis De Bernieres, Corelli's Mandolin

I have photographed seriously for the past fifteen
years--almost daily since 2002. My material is daily life and
appearances as I find them: the world in the ordinary course of my work
and family life, and in the social life of my generation and class. When
I travel, I also photograph what a passing stranger observes and feels
in various U.S. and Western European locales.

As at any moment the world only discloses the appearance
of its own historical time, my theme, simply stated, is the way we live
now. I strive to present experience, visual and emotional, and to create
characters at moments of true feeling. I strive to keep my pictures free
of extraneous information and of forms created only for the sake of
effect. In their concentration on subject, my pictures are emblematic as
opposed to discursive: I wish neither to describe nor to explain nor to
narrate.

I also try to express the impact of experience. As this
affects sight, feelings and consciousness, I strive for pictures at once
observant, lyrical, and meditative. My point of departure for a style to
contain all three models is the flexible plain or middle style.

I see, feel, imagine, and speak most accurately,
authentically and authoritatively about what I know first hand. I am 65,
and oncologist in Amarillo, Texas, where I grew up and to which I
returned at 37 after an Eastern education and 9 years' practice in
Washington, D.C. My work keeps me close to pain and death. I believe
that life is good despite the false values, injustice, conflict, crises,
catastrophes, and suffering that always beset it--none of which I wish
my pictures to deny. My work, then, is an imaginative account of life as
seen, I hope, unsentimentally but with feeling, intelligence, and
honesty from the vantage of my generation, class, experience, and
sensibility. My intent is that it affects viewers to contemplate, feel,
and re-imagine our present condition from their own vantage points. I
believe the importance of this work was best described by Cezanne:

From the
reindeer on cave walls to Monet's cliffs on pork butcher's walls, you
can follow the path of human development...From the hunters and
fisherman peopling the tombs of ancient Egypt...the Frescoes of Pisa and
Siena, the mythological paintings of Vernonese and Rubens...a spirit
emerges...everywhere the same: memory translated into objective form,
the painted memory of man achieving concrete existence...We are the same
man.